Seems to be common pratics that sites store plaintext password this days, one would think the programmers knew better, is it in an attempt to try and speed optimize things, they leave out hashing ?
Or is there a more sinister reason, someone twisting their arm around.

cray where heading that way also in the 90ish with their sss system, they where just adding many 2048 cpus per block.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-3/SSS
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/CRAY+COMPUTER+CORP.+COMPLETES+INITIAL+DEMONSTRATION+OF+THE+CRAY-3...-a016628331

The old commodore ieee488 drives like 8250 and 8050
used 100 tpi instead of 96tpi and manage to stuff 1.2mb
on a standart 5 1/4 DD DS floppy. Sounds like the same
ideer.